The courage to be your own Janitor

I recently watched a movie titled - Seven Pounds. I am not at any rate promoting or demoting the film. All opinions here are my own and infact have nothing to do with the movie. Perhaps just with the message that it brought out to me. It is a story of a person who impersonates to help people he affected in the past. As I watched the movie, I realized that the protagonist was actually trying to clean up. Atleast that is what it appeared to me. Trying to clean up after his own mess. Whether accidental or by design.

It takes a lot of courage to be your own Janitor. "Cleaning" up situations created in the past is often a task that many humans do not attempt to try. They fear the repercussions so much that they often give the responsibility to time to heal them. However, time is what you make of now.  A more closer look at the task is not what we need to do in these situations. Perhaps a more closer look is needed towards your own courage. The repairs might be simple enough and may be the tools are available too. But if you have trembling hands, your repair work can be quite clumsy and you may end up creating a bigger mess than the one you set out to clean.

A more pertinent question is - what are you afraid of? - The cleaning up task or the time that it would take to complete it or the difficulties that you would face when cleaning up.

Cleaning up should ideally not be a major problem, that is, if you know exactly what you want to clean up. So if there are pieces of your life that need mending, then you often also know how to mend them. The task of cleaning up is more about purpose than intentions. Before you choose to clean up, you need to know what purpose you are doing it for. You do not have to justify it, just be sure that it will help bring a sense of peace into your life.

I cannot know or prescribe a time frame for such emotionally draining and sensitive clean up acts. It may take a day or a life time, there are no guarantees. As long as there is a sense of purpose as mentioned above, time will not matter. As they say - Rome was not built in a day. Your clean up act might take the toll of your life as a price. Just be sure of your purpose I guess and I think you will be just fine.

It is not the two above that cause much heartache when such clean up acts are conjured up. It is the sheer fear of the difficulties in the path that make the task more onerous that it actually is. Mending the fences of the heart is a very tricky business. Not everyone will think alike and not everyone will understand you. As you mend the fences, you may end up breaking some other fences that you did not count for. Guess the only way to look at it, is to be very careful and level headed. Else you not only increase your difficulties manifold but also increase the number of things you now have to clean up.

So being your own Janitor needs a lot of courage, purpose and time. If you do not have either of these and you have had a messy trail behind you, then pray for a miracle.